Recycling Your Smartphones and Batteries

Recycling your smartphones and batteries

Why should you recycle your old mobile phone?

Most of us are hiding old phones in drawers, boxes or elsewhere in our homes. The truth is that we can recycle those old mobile phones and save tons of raw materials. We should think more about the sustainable usage of precious natural materials and reduction of pollution, so recycling unwanted mobile devices is a great solution. Actually, if we recycle or reuse them we will help the environment by saving energy and keeping reusable materials out of the landfills. Materials such as lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic and brominated flame retardants can contaminate air, soil, and groundwater.  Also, recycle helps for cutting future greenhouse gas emissions!

Over 90% of the materials used for the production of cell phones can be recovered and reused – materials like metals, plastics, rechargeable batteries. Mobiles are not biodegradable and they contain materials that can harm the environment. And 10 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions are avoided when we recover a tonne of cell phone materials.

Some facts about the US mobile recycling habits:

• Only 10% of the mobiles are recycled
• Recycling just one mobile phone can save energy to power a laptop for 44 hours
• Recycling 130 million mobile phones can save energy to power more than 24,000 homes for a year.

So how many unwanted phones you are hiding in your drawer? Save the planet – recycle those mobiles!

What about the batteries?

It is quite the same as the situation with the mobile phones. Batteries are made from resources and chemicals. In the past, batteries contained mercury and lead. Nowadays most batteries don’t contain mercury, but still, have some amount of lead. Those substances are dangerous for people’s health. Some batteries have sulfuric acid which is a very toxic material. Laptop batteries are one of those which have to be recycled because of their highly toxic materials.

Recycling batteries have to become our habit, otherwise, we are harming the environment and ourselves. If batteries reach the landfills they will leak into the ground, causing soil and water pollution. If batteries are burnt with household waste, the heavy metals in them will cause air pollution.

Sources: http://www.mobilemuster.com.au/

http://www.erp-batteries.co.uk/why/

http://environment.about.com/